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Social Network Woes Eased by OpenID?

With the steady increase in the number of ‘Social Network Sites’ over the past year, and being that JanRain is all about OpenID, we are definitely interested in the question “Could OpenID be Our Savior to the Social Network Blues?” Well, the short answer is Yes!

The longer answer is that with the attribute exchange feature in the soon to be released OpenID 2.0 spec you can specify custom fields for your online persona. For example a ‘friends’ field could be populated with a list of the OpenID accounts for your family, friends, and professional network. This field, if requested from a relying party (Social Network Site X) could then be passed on and automatically populate your network.

Thats the beauty of OpenID, its single-sign on and identification for users across websites, applications, networks. It enables portable identity, and shifts ownership of the user to the user. This gives people the opportunity to use their identities for reputation, social exchange, communications, and more.

If you have any questions about OpenID please visit us in the OpenID Channel On Pibb: